Not that Kim Kardashian could manage it back in 2014 posing for the same
magazine, but it seems Nicki Minaj is attempting to break the net with her own
Paper Magazine cover this month. The “Minaj À Trois,” cover shows a trio of
Nicki’s. One, sporting long black hair, wearing high-waisted panties and only
pasties over her nipples sits in a chair, while another Nicki stands behind her,
draping one hand on her seated sister’s breast, the other to her shoulder. A third
Nicki (and the one garnering the most controversy) kneels on the floor directly in
front of the seated one, her face down between the seated Nicki’s slightly spread
legs, and tongue out to the seated Nicki’s crotch.

Paper magazine scrawled across Twitter: “BTW, this is our new cover.
#BreakTheInternet.” So far have no had our services interrupted.”

What comes, yet again, as we see another female celebrity showing off skin or
sexuality, is a backlash from those who seem to be speaking for ‘younger women’
and the nature of our culture in general. Rapper Eve gave her opinion on “The
Talk” this week, chiming in with: “For me, personally, as I started coming up in
the business, I started realizing that young girls were looking up to me and younger
people were looking up to me. And not that you want to be a role model, but it is
what you are. It’s a responsibility whether you like it or not.”

In the New York Post, reporter Maureen Callahan sites both the Nicki show
and the fact that People Magazine just named Blake Shelton the sexiest man alive
as an attempt for Magazines’ ‘shocking’ covers show desperate attempt to stay
relevant (this is the title of her article in fact). Callahan continues in her article that
“The budget-conscious hiring of an editor who’s not an Anna, a Graydon, or a Tina
Brown is a seismic shift. Magazines were once aspirational…”

But isn’t Nicki’s Minaj À Trois inspirational in its own way? Won’t young girls in
fact see in Minaj a woman who does exactly what she wants with her image, on her
own terms, even if it doesn’t necessarily break a damn thing? And doesn’t the
famous rap diva know that, to shock is to sell these days, even if Ms. Callahan
doesn’t like to admit this fact?